Economic inequality at home and abroad

(NNPA)—Days before the opening of the World Economic Forum, Oxfam, the international organization that works on world poverty issues, released a report that addressed inequality. They found the international wealth gap growing rapidly. Last year, just 62 individuals had the same wealth as the 3.6 billion people who make up the bottom half of the world population. Wealth has become much more concentrated — in 2010, more than five times as many people shared the same amount of wealth as the bottom half.

While the top 62 people saw their wealth grow by 44 percent in five years, the bottom half saw their wealth drop by about the same amount (41 percent). And world incomes reflect increasingly concentrated wealth inequality. Nearly half of the world’s population lives on less than $2 a day. One in five people — 1.2 billion — live on less than a dollar a day. Oxfam says that, “growing economic inequality is bad for us all — it undermines growth and social cohesion…the consequences for the world’s poorest people are particularly severe.”